A Dialogue with the Published Form of the Unitarian Reading of John 12:41
Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory, and he spoke about him.
John 12:41
When the original article on John 12:41 was published, its Open Door promised that if the case for the unitarian reading appeared in fuller published form, the article would be supplemented in dialogue with it. That paper has now appeared.1 This supplement is the dialogue.
The published case develops the unitarian reading across some twenty-one pages: a detailed lexical apparatus on the Septuagint of Isaiah 52–53, an extended argument for reading the “glory” of John 12:41 as the kenotic glory of the Messiah’s humanity and death rather than the pre-existent divine glory of the Son, and a transcription of cross-examination from a 2003 debate in which the author of the case put a single pointed question to his interlocutor. The interlocutor did not answer it within the cross-examination time available. The original article responded to the position as a position; this supplement responds to the position in its published form, and begins by taking that question seriously.
The published case turns, at its sharpest point, on a single exegetical question:
Where did Isaiah speak about him in Isaiah 6?
The question is pointed, and it deserves a direct answer. The narrative of Isaiah 6 is the prophet’s commissioning vision. Isaiah sees a throne lofty and lifted up, hears the seraphim cry the Trisagion, confesses his uncleanness, receives the coal of cleansing, and is sent. The chapter closes with the hardening commission. Nowhere in Isaiah 6 does the prophet stop and speak about the Messiah in the way he plainly does in Isaiah 52:13–53:12, where the Servant is described stroke by stroke from his exaltation through his disfigurement, his silence before his shearers, his death with the wicked, his resurrection and prolonged days, his intercession for the transgressors. If “spoke about him” in John 12:41 means spoke a Messianic sentence in Isaiah’s text, then the location is Isaiah 53, not Isaiah 6.
The case is correct that, at the level of locating Isaiah’s Messianic sentences, Isaiah 52:13–53:12 is the natural address.
But John’s sentence at John 12:41 is not asking where Isaiah’s Messianic sentences are. It is grounding Isaiah’s prophetic testimony — including the two passages just cited — in one event of seeing.
The grammar of John 12:41, examined in the original article, reads: ταῦτα εἶπεν Ἠσαΐας ὅτι εἶδεν τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐλάλησεν περὶ αὐτοῦ. “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory, and he spoke about him.” The plural ταῦτα brings both quoted Isaian passages into the scope of what Isaiah “said.” The unitary causal clause that follows grounds them in one prophetic vision.
This is the standard grammar of a unifying causal clause behind a plural antecedent. He wrote these things because he had seen the truth. The seeing is one event; the writings are many; the seeing grounds them all.
So when John asks where Isaiah saw glory, the natural reading is: in the throne vision that authorized his prophetic ministry. And when John asks where Isaiah spoke about the Messiah, the natural reading is: throughout his prophetic ministry — in the Immanuel oracle of Isaiah 7, in the Mighty God oracle of Isaiah 9, in the Branch of Jesse of Isaiah 11, in the four Servant Songs of Isaiah 40–55, in the Spirit-of-the-Lord-is-upon-me oracle of Isaiah 61.
The grammatical force of John 12:41 is modest: the verse grounds the two explicitly quoted passages in the one vision. The broader claim — that the same vision authorized Isaiah’s whole prophetic Messianic testimony — is typological rather than strictly grammatical, but it rests on the consistent Johannine hermeneutic of reading Isaiah as a unified prophetic witness to Christ, evident at John 1:23, 6:45, and 8:56–58, where John already treats Isaian and patriarchal material as continuous prophetic testimony to the one Christ.2
The published case observes, correctly, that Isaiah did not stop in chapter 6 to speak about the Messiah by name. No one claims he did. What the catholic reading claims is that Isaiah’s whole speaking about the Messiah — which the case rightly locates in the Servant Songs and the messianic oracles — was grounded in the one prophetic vision he received in chapter 6.
The seeing and the speaking are separated by chapters and decades; they are joined by John’s ὅτι.
The question “where did Isaiah speak about him?” is therefore not answered by locating a single Messianic sentence in Isaiah 6. It is answered by Isaiah’s whole prophetic corpus — the Servant Songs, the messianic oracles, the Immanuel sign — whose authorizing vision was Isaiah 6.
The published case develops, at length and with lexical care, the argument that John 12:23 and 12:32 echo the ὑψόω and δοξάζω of Isaiah 52:13 LXX, and that Isaiah 52:14 LXX uses the substantive δόξα (“your glory”) of the Servant. The original article granted this argument in its fourth pressure and accepted the verbal echo as deliberate.3
The case proceeds from this lexical observation to the conclusion that the “glory” Isaiah saw in John 12:41 is the kenotic-and-glorified-in-death glory of the Servant, not the pre-existent divine glory of the Son. The original article disputed this conclusion at two points.
First, the published case grants the same Isaiah 52:13 LXX echo elsewhere — at John 8:28, where the same ὑψόω applies to Christ’s death. The granting is in the case’s own footnote.4 The principle, granted at John 8:28, must hold at John 12:23 and 12:32 — with the additional weight that John 12:23 and 12:32 use the verb pair of Isaiah 52:13 LXX in the same combination, and that John 12:38 quotes Isaiah 53:1 from the same Isaian unit four verses later. The Suffering Servant is in John’s hand at John 12:38; the verbal echo at John 12:23 and 12:32 is the same Suffering Servant. The catholic reading accepts all of this.
Second, the catholic reading does not split the “glory” Isaiah saw into a separable kenotic glory and a separable pre-existent glory. The δόξα Isaiah saw is one. The Servant who is glorified-exceedingly in Isaiah 52:13 LXX is the Servant whose form is without beauty in Isaiah 53:2 LXX, who is the δόξα of the only-begotten from the Father in John 1:14, who is the glory the Psalmist addressed and the Lord whose years do not fail in Hebrews 1:12, who is the glory the rulers of his own people refused in favor of human glory at John 12:43. There are not two glories, ranged between Christ’s heavenly being and his earthly suffering. There is one glory of one Person, revealed in self-emptying and exaltation as a single mystery.
The published case argues, in effect, for a sectioned glory — divine in some passages, human in others, with John 12:41’s δόξα located on the human-and-glorified-in-death side. The catholic reading holds, with the Fathers, that the kenotic and the exalted are one δόξα of one Son.
The original article documented, at primary-source level, the pre-Nicene Christological reading of Isaiah 6 — Justin Martyr in the Dialogue with Trypho 56–65 (ca. 155–160), Irenaeus in Against Heresies 4.20.6–11 (ca. 180), Tertullian in Against Praxeas 11–16 (ca. 213), and Origen across the nine extant Homilies on Isaiah (ca. 245–248).5 The argument was not that any of these fathers settled the doctrinal question, but that the Christological reading of Isaiah 6 is pre-Nicene by at least three quarters of a century in Origen’s case, and by nearly two centuries in Justin’s — predating the conciliar formulations a unitarian reader can name as anachronism.
The published case does not engage this chain.
The case notes, in passing, the Targum tradition of Isaiah 6:1 (rendered as “the glory of the Lord” rather than direct vision of YHWH), and reports an observation from a major Catholic Johannine commentator that some later theologians held Jesus to be one of the seraphs in the vision.6 Both observations are real and worth registering. The Targum tradition is evidence that the divine glory of Isaiah 6:1 was already, in pre-Christian Aramaic rendering, mediated glory — the shekinah of the Lord, the visible irradiation of the unseen God. This is consonant with what the original article called the John 1:18 constraint: that only the Son has seen the Father.
The seraph-identification attributed to those later theologians is not the catholic reading. The seraph belongs to the angelic hierarchy, not to the Son, and the speculative version of this reading — most fully developed in Origen’s identification of the two seraphim as the Son and the Holy Spirit — was not retained by later orthodox tradition, which viewed it as overly speculative and subordinationist in tendency.
But the actual primary-source witnesses — Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen on the broader question of who Isaiah saw — by name, identifying Isaiah by name, reading the throne vision as a vision of the pre-incarnate Son, are not in the published case. The claim that the Christological reading of Isaiah 6 is a fourth-century retrojection does not survive the second-century texts of Justin and Irenaeus, or the third-century texts of Tertullian and Origen. The published case has not, in its present form, engaged this.
The reading the Church received from her earliest extant engagement with John 12:41 and Isaiah 6 stands where the original article placed it.
Isaiah saw, in his prophetic call-vision, the pre-existent glory of the eternal Son. That vision authorized his whole prophetic witness — the Servant Songs, the messianic oracles, the Immanuel sign, the Spirit-of-the-Lord-is-upon-me, the hardening commission. The Son whose glory Isaiah saw is the Son whose form would be marred without beauty (Isaiah 53:2), who would be glorified-exceedingly in his death (Isaiah 52:13), who would be lifted up at Calvary (John 12:32), who would be enthroned and remain when the heavens wear out (Hebrews 1:10–12), who is the δόξα of the only-begotten from the Father (John 1:14).
Isaiah saw him before he came down. Isaiah spoke about him through every Servant Song and every messianic oracle. The seeing and the speaking are one prophet’s witness to one Son.
The published case has been read, in its strongest form, and engaged in dialogue. The reading the Church received reads the verse here.
The published case engaged in this supplement is the most fully developed articulation of the unitarian reading of John 12:41 / Isaiah 6 / Isaiah 53 currently available in print. Greg G. Stafford, “He Saw His Glory, and He Spoke About Him,” Part Two of an Elihu Books Blog series (Apr.–June 2007); PDF re-issued 22 July 2011 with introductory note. Twenty-one pages, including transcription of cross-examination from the 2003 Tampa, Florida debate. The published case develops material first presented in Stafford, Jehovah’s Witnesses Defended: An Answer to Scholars and Critics, 2nd ed. (Elihu Books, 2000), with subsequent material in the 3rd ed., Revised Third Edition Digital Version (Murrieta, Calif.: Elihu Books, 2012). ↩︎
On John’s hermeneutic of reading Isaiah and the patriarchal narratives as continuous prophetic witness to Christ, see John 1:23 (Isaiah 40:3 applied to the Baptist’s witness to Christ), John 6:45 (Isaiah 54:13 in a Christological context), and John 8:56–58 (Abraham “saw” Christ’s day, paralleling Isaiah’s prophetic vision in 12:41). For broader treatment, see Catrin H. Williams, I Am He: The Interpretation of ‘Anî Hû’ in Jewish and Early Christian Literature, WUNT II/113 (Mohr Siebeck, 2000); Maarten J. J. Menken, Old Testament Quotations in the Fourth Gospel (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1996); Bruce G. Schuchard, Scripture Within Scripture, SBLDS 133 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992). ↩︎
For the scholarly literature on the deliberate Isaiah 52:13 LXX echo in John 12:23 and 12:32, see the original article (“The Glory Isaiah Saw,” §V, n. 5), citing Köstenberger, John (BECNT) ad loc. 12:23, 12:32; Keener, The Gospel of John 2:877–78; Brown, John (XIII–XXI), Anchor Bible 29A, 2:468–69; Moloney, The Gospel of John, Sacra Pagina, ad loc.; Menken, Old Testament Quotations in the Fourth Gospel; Schuchard, Scripture Within Scripture, SBLDS 133; Williams, I Am He, WUNT II/113. On the substantive reading of δόξα in John as godlikeness/divinity, see further L. H. Brockington, “The Septuagintal Background to the New Testament Use of ΔΟΞΑ,” in D. E. Nineham (ed.), Studies in the Gospels: Essays in Memory of R. H. Lightfoot (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), 1–8, building on his earlier lexical work in “The Greek Translator of Isaiah and His Interest in ΔΟΞΑ,” Vetus Testamentum 1 (1951): 23–32; with subsequent backing in Robert G. Bratcher, “What Does ‘Glory’ Mean in Relation to Jesus? Translating doxa and doxazo in John,” The Bible Translator 42.4 (October 1991): 401–408 (open access PDF), which preserves the Brockington 1955 quotation at p. 407. The published case engaged here cites the 1951 article but does not engage the 1955 companion piece. ↩︎
Stafford, Jehovah’s Witnesses Defended, 3rd ed. (Elihu Books, 2012), 245 n. 55; corresponding discussion in the 2007 paper at pp. 4–5. The footnote grants the Isaiah 52:13 LXX echo at John 8:28; the principle, once granted, applies a fortiori at John 12:23 and 12:32, where the verb pair appears in the same combination as in Isaiah 52:13 LXX, and where John 12:38 quotes Isaiah 53:1 from the same Isaian unit. ↩︎
Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 56–65 (PG 6.593–620; ANF 1); Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haereses 4.20.6–11 (SC 100.2:640–649; ANF 1); Tertullian of Carthage, Adversus Praxean 11–16 (CSEL 47:250–255; ANF 3); Origen of Alexandria, Homilies on Isaiah, tr. Elizabeth Ann Dively Lauro, Fathers of the Church 142 (CUA Press, 2021), critical Latin in Origenes Werke 8, GCS 33 (Hinrichs, 1925). The dates: Justin ca. 155–160 CE; Irenaeus ca. 180 CE; Tertullian ca. 213 CE; Origen Homilies on Isaiah delivered ca. 245–248 CE at Caesarea. All four predate the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) by between approximately 80 and 170 years. For the methodological symmetry on the Jerome and Rufinus Latin transmission of Origen, see “The Glory Isaiah Saw,” §VI and n. 11. ↩︎
For the Targum tradition reading of Isaiah 6:1, see Bruce D. Chilton, The Isaiah Targum: Introduction, Translation, Apparatus, and Notes, Aramaic Bible 11 (Wilmington: Glazier, 1987), ad loc. On the seraph-identification, cited in the published case at p. 14 n. 124: Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (i–xii), Anchor Bible 29 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), 487. The same Anchor Bible commentary (Brown, John i–xii, 486–487) is the source for the Targum tradition reference. ↩︎
